Chapter IX: Sacred Scroll
"What we wanted, we did not know; what we knew, we did not want." (Ernst von Salomon)
This is an ode to the metaphysical piece of parchment held in the national Archives called the U.S. Constitution: It is a document that produced a government weak enough to preserve slavery and rigid enough to resist social change forever. It made sure that "private property" was just another name for the "public good," and it established a machinery of divided government that dispersed even a semblance of responsibility into a haze of impotent recriminations.
Because the Constitution allowed us to build a society without a plan, and then gummed-up its own machinery so badly that a plan could never be devised after the fact, it should not be surprising that there is little enthusiasm now for building a new society. For we were consigned at birth to become what we have become: A permanently divided and unstable society.
We are the only state in the known universe that has 310 million guns, enough for nearly every man woman and child in the nation. As a direct result, we have become one of the most violent societies in the world, with the most brutal police forces, the harshest system of criminal justice, a fourth of the world's prisoners, among the most repressed drug laws in the world, a lazy and sycophantic press, and a racially segregated society with grotesquely gerrymandered Congressional Districts.
The same U.S. Constitution that we thought was intended to make us a nation ruled by law instead of by men, has done just the opposite: made us a nation of men, who tailor the laws to suit their own politics and personal greed.
Chapter X: Capitalist Tool
"In democracies, nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce. It attracts the attention of the public and fills the imagination of the multitudes." (Alexis de Tocqueville).
As the author notes: The complex mechanisms of politics in the modern world depend as certainly on the faith in money as the structures in the medieval world depended on the faith in God.
The entrance onto the national political stage of so many wealthy amateurs suggests that holding elected office has become largely ceremonial -- a matter of knowing when to smile, how to read a script from a teleprompter and where to stand to take photo ops.
Chapter XI: Balzac's Garret
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, yet soft pipes, play on." (John Keats, An Ode to a Grecian Urn).
Americans are a people that can hear music in the air, but are tone-deaf to every sound but their own self-promoting jingle. America is an MTV video of itself trapped in Disneyland, and by its own standards, Michael Jackson should be added to Mount Rushmore as one of its postmodern founders. MJ had all of the attributes of a latter day founding father: filthy rich, grabbing at every worthless and meaningless object, self-absorbed and lost in a world of too much money that he and the next ten generations could never spend.
Put simply Americans are a people captured by the power and romance of symbol and metaphor over substance. We are forever seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible. We grab on to everything but hold on to nothing because we are still too busy grasping for the next item in the riot to the sales table. This in part explains why the American dream was always intended as a symbolic asymptote, never to actually be reached but to be pointed to forever as a possibility that would elude most of us.
The point of the shared American melodrama is to serve as a sacred vehicle into which we can then stuff all our troubling moral conflicts. There, tucked safely away from the threat of ever becoming real, they can be played out as a mind game where America always comes out the winner in the same way that Scarlett O'Hara's dreams reversed the outcomes of the Civil War, or Disneyland brings alive and to a resounding victory, all of our imaginary heroes.
This drama of make-believe, so vital to maintaining the American mind in a steady-state, has been coordinated with three generations of TV ads that bombard the subliminal mind 24/7, leaving no room for uncluttered thought or free intellectual interchange. It is a technological "mind-swamp" meant to seem self-imposed, but which, in fact, in every way possible, is "state sanctioned and carefully staged-managed state mind control."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
